"'You'll get yourselves in serious trouble if the Governor finds out you keep the whole prison awake … romping about and laughing in the condemned cells.' I wondered vaguely what more serious trouble we could get into than we were already in."
Few people following his trial would have guessed that the young teacher sentenced to death in November 1926 for the murder of his stepbrother would live to become one of South Africa's most famous writers. Herman Charles Bosman spent nine days in the death cell, before the sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment. When Bosman was released on parole some four years later, he began his astonishing writing career as journalist and unequalled storyteller.
A project to re-edit the texts of all his works in their original, unabridged and uncensored form by 2005, the centenary of his birth, came into being late in 1997. This book, hailed as Bosman's masterpiece of irony, forms part of that project. It is a gripping story that vividly stays with one like a personal experience.